5 ms·

DHH mentioned they built it to move from the cloud to bare metal. He glorifies the simplicity but I can't help thinking they are a special use case of predictab

by oDot 2y ago

DHH mentioned they built it to move from the cloud to bare metal. He glorifies the simplicity but I can't help thinking they are a special use case of predictable, non-huge load. Uber, for example, moved to the cloud. I feel like in the span between them there are far more companies for which Kamal is not enough. I hope I'm wrong, though. It'll be nice for many companies to be have the choice of exiting the cloud.

pinkgolem 2y ago
I mean most B2B company have a pretty predictable load when providing services to employees.. I can get weeks advance notice before we have a load increase through new users
appendix-rock 2y ago
You can’t talk about typical cases and then bring up Uber.
olieidel 2y ago
> I feel like in the span between them there are far more companies for which Kamal is not enough. I feel like this is a bias in the HN bubble: In the real world, 99% of companies with any sort of web servers (cloud or otherwise) are running very boring, constant, non-Uber workloads.
- ksec 2y ago
  Not just HN but overall the whole internet. Because all the news and article, tech achievements are pumped out from Uber and other big tech companies. I am pretty sure Uber belongs to the 1% of the internet companies in terms of scale. 37Signals isn't exactly small either. They spend $3M a year on infrastructure in 2019. Likely a lot higher now. The whole Tech cycle needs to stop having a top down approach where everyone are doing what Big tech are using. Instead we should try to push the simplest tool from low end all the way to 95% mark.
  - nchmy 2y ago
    They spend considerably less on infra now - this was the entire point of moving off cloud. DHH has written and spoken lots about it, providing real numbers. They bought their own servers and the savings paid for it all in like 6 months. Now its just money in the bank til they replace the hardware in 5 years. Cloud is a scam for the vast majority of companies.
martinald 2y ago
I don't think that's the real point. The real point is that 'big 3' cloud providers are so overpriced that you could run hugely over provisioned infra 24/7 for your load (to cope with any spikes) and still save a fortune. The other thing is that cloud hardware is generally very very slow and many engineers don't seem to appreciate how bad it is. Slow single thread performance because of using the most parallel CPUs possible (which are the cheapest per W for the hyperscalers), very poor IO speeds, etc. So often a lot of this devops/infra work is solved by just using much faster hardware. If you have a fairly IO heavy workload then switching from slow storage to PCIe4 7gbyte/sec NVMe drives is going to solve so many problems. If your app can't do much work in parallel then CPUs with much faster single threading performance can have huge gains.
- jsheard 2y ago
  It's sad that what should have been a huge efficiency win, amortizing hardware costs across many customers, ended up often being more expensive than just buying big servers and letting them idle most of the time. Not to say the efficiency isn't there, but the cloud providers are pocketing the savings.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    If you want a compute co-op, build a co-op (think VCs building their own GPU compute clusters for portfolio companies). Public cloud was always about using marketing and the illusion of need for dev velocity (which is real, hypergrowth startups and such, just not nearly as prevalent as the zeitgeist would have you believe) to justify the eye watering profit margin. Most businesses have fairly predictable interactive workload patterns, and their batch jobs are not high priority and can be managed as such (with the usual scheduling and bin packing orchestration). Wikipedia is one of the top 10 visited sites on the internet, and they run in their own datacenter, for example. The FedNow instant payment system the Federal Reserve recently went live with still runs on a mainframe. Bank of America was saving $2B a year running their own internal cloud (although I have heard they are making an attempt to try to move to a public cloud). My hot take is public cloud was an artifact of ZIRP and cheap money, where speed and scale were paramount, cost being an afterthought (Russ Hanneman pre-revenue bit here, "get big fast and sell"; great fit for cloud). With that macro over, and profitability over growth being the go forward MO, the equation might change. Too early to tell imho. Public cloud margins are compute customer opportunities.
toberoni 2y ago
I feel Uber is the outlier here. For every unicorn company there are 1000s of companies that don't need to scale to millions of users. And due to the insane markup of many cloud services it can make sense to just use beefier servers 24/7 to deal with the peaks. From my experience crazy traffic outliers that need sophisticated auto-scaling rarely happens outside of VC-fueled growth trajectories.

by oDot 2y ago

pinkgolem 2y ago

I mean most B2B company have a pretty predictable load when providing services to employees.. I can get weeks advance notice before we have a load increase through new users

appendix-rock 2y ago

You can’t talk about typical cases and then bring up Uber.

olieidel 2y ago

> I feel like in the span between them there are far more companies for which Kamal is not enough. I feel like this is a bias in the HN bubble: In the real world, 99% of companies with any sort of web servers (cloud or otherwise) are running very boring, constant, non-Uber workloads.

ksec 2y ago
Not just HN but overall the whole internet. Because all the news and article, tech achievements are pumped out from Uber and other big tech companies. I am pretty sure Uber belongs to the 1% of the internet companies in terms of scale. 37Signals isn't exactly small either. They spend $3M a year on infrastructure in 2019. Likely a lot higher now. The whole Tech cycle needs to stop having a top down approach where everyone are doing what Big tech are using. Instead we should try to push the simplest tool from low end all the way to 95% mark.
- nchmy 2y ago
  They spend considerably less on infra now - this was the entire point of moving off cloud. DHH has written and spoken lots about it, providing real numbers. They bought their own servers and the savings paid for it all in like 6 months. Now its just money in the bank til they replace the hardware in 5 years. Cloud is a scam for the vast majority of companies.

martinald 2y ago

I don't think that's the real point. The real point is that 'big 3' cloud providers are so overpriced that you could run hugely over provisioned infra 24/7 for your load (to cope with any spikes) and still save a fortune. The other thing is that cloud hardware is generally very very slow and many engineers don't seem to appreciate how bad it is. Slow single thread performance because of using the most parallel CPUs possible (which are the cheapest per W for the hyperscalers), very poor IO speeds, etc. So often a lot of this devops/infra work is solved by just using much faster hardware. If you have a fairly IO heavy workload then switching from slow storage to PCIe4 7gbyte/sec NVMe drives is going to solve so many problems. If your app can't do much work in parallel then CPUs with much faster single threading performance can have huge gains.

jsheard 2y ago
It's sad that what should have been a huge efficiency win, amortizing hardware costs across many customers, ended up often being more expensive than just buying big servers and letting them idle most of the time. Not to say the efficiency isn't there, but the cloud providers are pocketing the savings.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  If you want a compute co-op, build a co-op (think VCs building their own GPU compute clusters for portfolio companies). Public cloud was always about using marketing and the illusion of need for dev velocity (which is real, hypergrowth startups and such, just not nearly as prevalent as the zeitgeist would have you believe) to justify the eye watering profit margin. Most businesses have fairly predictable interactive workload patterns, and their batch jobs are not high priority and can be managed as such (with the usual scheduling and bin packing orchestration). Wikipedia is one of the top 10 visited sites on the internet, and they run in their own datacenter, for example. The FedNow instant payment system the Federal Reserve recently went live with still runs on a mainframe. Bank of America was saving $2B a year running their own internal cloud (although I have heard they are making an attempt to try to move to a public cloud). My hot take is public cloud was an artifact of ZIRP and cheap money, where speed and scale were paramount, cost being an afterthought (Russ Hanneman pre-revenue bit here, "get big fast and sell"; great fit for cloud). With that macro over, and profitability over growth being the go forward MO, the equation might change. Too early to tell imho. Public cloud margins are compute customer opportunities.

toberoni 2y ago

I feel Uber is the outlier here. For every unicorn company there are 1000s of companies that don't need to scale to millions of users. And due to the insane markup of many cloud services it can make sense to just use beefier servers 24/7 to deal with the peaks. From my experience crazy traffic outliers that need sophisticated auto-scaling rarely happens outside of VC-fueled growth trajectories.